Imago
by taratron
Summary: You cannot stop the process once it's begun.


Part One

It was not that Scorponok was a poor patroller. His beast mode was well suited to cover rough terrain, and unlike the many flyers in the Predacon ranks, he could continue patrolling even in the worst of dust storms or lightning strikes. But also unlike the flyers, and Tarantulas, and even Blackarachnia, on the rare times she patrolled (it was, of course, in Megatron's best interest to keep a good optic on the activities of the spiders, and keeping them separated most of the time was always a good plan) and was not at work improving Darkside's defense systems, he lacked any form of grace when it came to the physical activities that often came with patrolling: namely Maximal intrusion. It was also not that Scorponok was a poor fighter; he was well armed and had altered his cyber-bees with a myriad of different potions and chemicals, but it _was_ the fact that by the time he had spotted the Maximal on radar, and started to ready himself for battle, he was already on his back, with his scorpion tail, more often that not, jammed into his shoulder or his back, and often the surprise of it all (and it was always a surprise, really) was enough that he would shoot himself several times before stasis lock, or a well placed Maximal shot, took him down.

It was not, he thought to himself on the long walk from the R tank back to his quarters, the walk that he knew was really only six hundred half-steps if he was going slow, but a good three hundred plus if he was nervous or carrying something heavy, which he almost always ended up dragging behind him, precisely _fair_, but he knew that expecting any form of justice outside personal vendettas (Megatron did not actively encourage such activities, oh no, but they were amusing to watch and for Predacon life, it was normal to actively dislike your teammates. Attempted termination was a good way to keep spirits up and everyone on edge. Predacons _not_ on edge tended to think about things, like how better they would be at running the Darkside, with actual decent plots that would work.) was exactly the kind of idiocy most everyone expected from him. Not that most any of the Predacons would _ask_, and nor should they; it was enough to know that Scorponok was around, most of the time repairing things that were not important enough to toss to Tarantulas, that he could always be heard a good distance away, either striking his tail or claws against the walls of the ship, or muffled curses if he fell over and was unable to right himself right off, that he was, overall, a lackey of Megatron's that could be counted on secret keeping if only because no one would listen to any of his ramblings.

But still, it was not precisely fair. He had never asked for such a bulky beast mode that had caused him to grow from a once sleek and slender bot into a walking destruction zone. He had never _asked_ for the loss of his technical hands, only able to work with the computers easily if he directly plugged into them, and linking to the mainframe had always given him some form of a head ache, and he certainly had never asked for claws as thick and cumbersome as half-formed appendages that were unable to hold test tubes, that were useless for most everything other than directly striking something, or shooting cyber-bees, most of which, with such flimsy work he could do on them, exploded before he even had his claws open. It was not as if Darkside had come equipped with the needed machines to armor the bees fully, and the materials on this planet were hardly close in quality to the base ores of Cybertron mines.

Three hundred and fifty steps now, multiplied by six metal feet as he continued to his quarters. On his patrols before, he had often seen native organic scorpions, small nasty things they were, and stupid too, blindly stabbing at most everything they came across, wasting poison and thrashing around the more you let off them with your foot, but they had had a dexterity that came with being small and organic: they could and did survive great falls (and throws, if the truth was to be known) and could climb most any surface. He had even found them hanging upside down in crevices, or flattened to a point where he was sure the stupid things were dead, but they survived. He, on the other hand, was no tiny thrashing animal, though at times, he knew, he was a _large_ thrashing animal flipped onto his back, or half stuck on one of the disgusting webs Tarantulas seemed to leave around for fun. It would have been nice, he imagined, to have had a smaller, more slender form still, but he doubted that a scorpion beastmode would have allowed him at all half of the native organic's movements with such ease, though he did often have small fantasies about waking the screeching Terrorsaur up from his nightly roost, on the times beastmode instinct was strong, by shoving him down from his clutching grip on the ceiling.

He was nearly to his quarters when footsteps around and over his echoed in the hallway, and he nearly froze into place to let the other pass by over him, stepping around as the case may be, but after a moment's pause, he continued. Despite everything so far with this planet and the war, he was still Megatron's second in command, and-

_Run!_ squealed a bestial hiss from the tiny tiny part of the organic mind that had come with an organic-like form, but instead he froze as the larger Predacon simply stepped over him, six black legs striking around the smaller scorpion, and he found himself flattening to the floor in reaction. Inferno, for his part, simply continued down the corridor without a pause, without a look back, and stalked off.

_Second in command indeed_.

He stared after the much larger Predacon with undisguised distaste, not that that mattered either. Inferno seemed incapable of understanding any form of nuance in any conversation or body language unless it was about his Royalty, though as a small spark in Inferno's favor, he did seem intelligent enough to watch the spiders moreso than any other Predacon, at least for hints of the treachery that followed them as easily as shadows, as tracking devices. But unlike Waspinator, who seemed to grasp most concepts well, Inferno was single-mindedly listening only for words from Queen Megatron (though Megatron seemed to be getting very exasperated with the title, and soon perhaps a blast would convince Inferno to cease his chatter). Unlike Waspinator as well, and indeed, most of the Predacons, Inferno never appeared bored either, and thus he never seemed to strike out because of it; you never had to worry about waking from recharge to see Inferno in your quarters. If he _was_ there, of course, he was there to wake you and drag you out on some insane mission, but he was _not_ there to plant bugs in your quarters, or to leave paint stripper around, or to cause any more intentional havoc than he did unintentional. For that, Scorponok could almost _like_ the insufferable ant.

But he didn't.

Part of it, of course, was just Inferno being Inferno: a brash and loud but undeniably stupidly loyal Predacon for whom the word "treachery" meant eyeing the spiders. There were no innuendos with Inferno; there was no secret language of reading between the lines and the words of normal speech. Instructing him to show someone the light would end with the someone set aflame, and Inferno never understanding what the matter was. He was, for a Predacon, amazingly simple and straightforward, something as alien to the other Predacons as treachery would have been to Inferno. But that aside, he was a fanatic. Scorponok could _deal_ with fanaticism. He understood, to a point, a need for compulsive behaviors (beastmode had shown him that much, at least), and having another Predacon around who was not so blatantly disloyal to Megatron was nice, but did Megatron himself have to act as though his first loyal comrade and now second-in-command, now that the idiot Dinobot was gone, was now more incompetent than Terrorsaur and Waspinator combined, that Inferno was the only trustworthy one around? So no, it was not _all_ Inferno's fault, since he would never grasp the concept of jealousy, much less a social structure that deemed a fellow "drone" such as Scorponok of higher value as the second in command, since Inferno had never sought to become Megatron's unofficial new second, but if only Inferno had more flaws than his speech issues. If only he was a terrible fighter, or could not fly without crashing instantly, or if only he was any number of things that Scorponok already was. But he wasn't. No, Megatron was often furious with his titles from the ant, but he was more or less pleased with Inferno and his undying loyalty, Queendom aside. And Megatron surely knew of his second's jealousy, of his fear of being replaced, but he would never see a reason to assure him otherwise. Keeping his subordinates wily and watching him, loyalty aside, was always good form for Megatron.

Besides, it was not as if Scorponok had anywhere else to go, or anyone else he would follow to the Pit itself.

And despite it all, he had remained loyal to Megatron; Megatron, of course, still had his plans regarding the Golden Disk, regarding finding a good cache of energon somewhere, and perhaps, with their transwarp capabilities as they had once had, even time enough to build an army before a successful return and coup of Maximal High Command. The BeastWars were nothing, Megatron had told him once, but a small step barely out of the way of their initial plan. Besides, there was the traitor Dinobot to deal with as well; the war almost had taken a back seat in importance of life overall when it came to Dinobot and his betrayal. Primus alone knew what he had told the Maximals about their initial plans, but Scorponok largely suspected the raptor had kept his silence. He had never really been a talker as a Predacon, and surely life with the Maximals would not change that, short of a reprogramming.

Inferno was long gone by the time he rose enough to continue to his quarters, thoughts of Dinobot and the accursed ant echoing in his mind. Perhaps Dinobot would have been coined as a Princess had he remained a Predacon, but had he remained, Scorponok might have even been pushed from third-in-command and to Megatron's ear to a lowly rank with the idiot flyers. He knew that Megatron knew, without a doubt, that he was far too stupid for thoughts of disloyalty to ever cross his mind.

_Stupid_.

And that, of course, was the ultimate unfairness in this all. He had never asked for this beastmode; he had never asked for this large and cumbersome form without its finesse (scorpions, he had decided, were just not built to be large, oxygen content in the atmosphere aside), and he had certainly never asked for the ship's crashing and his subsequent spin and knock into the hull's wall when they had crashed. He had woken in the R-tank almost a day later and with his new form already selected for him; at the time, with the excitement of the crash and Dinobot's quick betrayal, with the knowledge that Darkside would never fly again, with the coming of knowledge of the Maximal ship also crashing, nothing wrong had been noted at first, and he himself had not noticed anything was different. It had taken some days later for him, and indeed the others, to discover that the crash had not just left him in stasis and in need of repairs for a while, that it had, in fact, left him permanently damaged.

If only. If only they had had more time when they had stolen Darkside, once named Lightseeker, some foolish Maximal name. If only Terrorsaur and Waspinator had plotted out the moving of the guards more. If only they had disconnected the needed drives in the Axalon too, leaving Darkside with more than ample time to pick up additional supplies before the transwarp jump. If only the final crash and last flight of Darkside hadn't ended when it had. If only he had been strapped down to one of the firing stations, as Waspinator and Terrorsaur had. If only he hadn't been trying to repair one of the cannon beams when the crash had started. All of the if only's combined led to the end result: the crash had left him damaged, his mental circuits in disarray, and many of them, common parts all, damaged beyond repair. Their meager supplies had not included any such replacement parts, and the Maximals who had stocked the ship prior had left it painfully without any form of repair drones or equipment beyond the R-tank, which had been disabled during the crash as well.

The end result of it all was that he had been left unattended to for several hours before anyone had found him, and there had been a good deal of time before the R-tank had been up and running to attend to his needs. The final result was that when he left the R-tank, alive and well and feeling fine, part of him was not and likely never would be again without a complete rewiring and possible reprogramming. It was not, he suspected, that his mind had been offline and never reawakened (as Tarantulas was fond of saying) or that he had ever been braindead, in an organic sense, because he was _certain_ that his thoughts were the same as ever, though of course there was no way to know that for sure without opening his mind up to either of the spiders, a disgusting thought, but somewhere from his mind to...anywhere else in his form, his thoughts, coherent enough at origin, fell apart. His speech was more than enough evidence of that; he knew for a cold fact that he was capable of multisyllablic words, but more often than not, he found himself reduced to simple statements that the others still eyed him oddly over, even the bumbling Waspinator, who had _always_ been like that.

Somehow the stares were the worst, at least for the first few days. But by then his malady was known to everyone, and perhaps Megatron had checked into the R-tank for a full damage status report, but perhaps not. The end result was, as always, the same: he was now the second in command, Megatron's most loyal soldier, and could barely form a sentence or execute a sharp turn to save his life. The smallest mercy, he suspected, was that the despicable Dinobot had not been around to see him suffer so. As a Maximal fodder now, who knew what the raptor saw versus what he knew to be true. He usually never gave Scorponok a chance to speak, regardless.

He had never asked for any of this, of course, but trying to explain that to Megatron, to even attempt to say that his thoughts _felt_ undamaged and as clear as ever, it was merely the execution of them that led him to difficulty, was impossible. He was loyal, and trustworthy to a form, Megatron knew, but he was also unforgivingly stupid in a way that not even Waspinator could match. The wasp had _always_ been a fool; his only qualification was that he was an excellent booby for any trap set. He had not been recruited onto the mission, per se, but had come along with Terrorsaur, and Megatron, even then, had been quick to set upon him for, he had told Scorponok and Dinobot in private later, one always could use cannon fodder. Whereas Scorponok had been a close confidant to Megatron during all the years past on Cybertron; he had been present at the start of the plan for this mission; he had helped find Tarantulas and bring him in as well, and now.

Now Waspinator was still cannon fodder, useful but cannon fodder still, and Scorponok...was a useless second-in-command whose memories were shaded with damage, who struggled to express words to anyone who might listen, who was mocked and laughed at by even Waspinator and Terrorsaur for his stupidity and clumsiness, and the worst part was that he knew even a few months ago none of them would have _dared_ to whisper what they said to his face now, laughing and climbing or stalking away, leaving Inferno, the blasted blasted Inferno, to drag his stasis locked form back to base after a battle. It was not at all that Scorponok was stupid; it was, however, that he knew of no other way.

He entered his quarters with barely a pause; he was no longer important enough in the eyes of the crew to need to truly worry about boobytraps, but old habits died hard. If he strained to remember, truly concentrated on it, he could recall no less than a dozen attempts on his life serving with Megatron on another crew, before this mess with the Golden Disk and the BeastWars, and Megatron had not been anyone truly of status power then; his second in command, at the time, had not been either. Of course, Dinobot had come in shortly later and Scorponok had been replaced, but even with that his loyalty never wavered.

His door slid shut behind him silently, and he was left alone, as he largely almost always was now. The last of the hoverboards had been repaired for the day, but they had also been damaged in the crash, and required nearly weekly repairs. That was one of the few things he was trusted with, he imagined, because no one else had the desire to fix such droll things, and he and Megatron were the only Predacons forced to remain landbound as well.

His lab lay before him; bits and pieces of salvaged metals and computer parts, shards of liquid energon nearly too small to see, and many many leftover pieces of cyber-bee production, heads and antennae and bug parts about to the point it looked like a Waspinator graveyard, if one's tastes ran that way. The tables holding the many shards and scraps of metal were the only real trace of anyone living in his quarters; his recharge bunk was across the room from it, and his beast mode did not demand any form of physical need, unlike Terrorsaur's improvization with welding large metal hulks across his ceiling for perches. His personal laptop was not used often, and wore a light sheen of dust.

Now he had nothing to do. No true way to fill the hours until the mid-afternoon, when his first patrol in several weeks would begin. Of course, he knew that if he was truly pressed (and had a need for depression, of course) he could locate Inferno and keep busy with digging and hauling rocks; Inferno was a firm believer in removing chunks of unstable ground, even if that meant letting more lava pool closer to the base. Or if he approached the ant right, Inferno might even be willing to take a break and play some form of holo-cards, not that Scorponok had the concentration for such a game, and nor did Inferno. But of course, he had no want to visit the fanatic, and he had even less of a want to be reminded of his constant stupidity from the other crew members, and Megatron was busy and not the sort one paid a social visit to.

He settled into an induced and timed recharge, for lack of most anything else to do, and waited for a reason to wake and bear a semblance of use again. _If only. If only this was not reality. If only things would change_.

Sector Nimbus was one of the few sectors Terrorsaur had been given the right to name; the sector was named after some likely fellow fool friend of his back on Cybertron, a person of such wonderful magnitude, such great aim and death rate in the last dregs of the Great War, that he apparently had to be immortalized via a land locked of scorched earth with deep gullies and arroyos with crumbling walls of sand. A desert point to the finest, though a smattering of data collection had revealed that an active volcano _had_ stood at this spot some million years ago, and the area around it was just as lifeless as it likely had been following that final eruption.

Such a wonderful extension of Predacon territory, though if anyone had asked Scorponok, it was a waste of territory claimed only because the Maximals would not want it, but someone had to own it. Miles from any range of energon, Nimbus was a mix of lava rock, dead dirt clods, and occassionally the glimpses of a skeletal structure barely unearthed by seismic activity from the active volcanos miles away.

But it was still Predacon land, and Megatron was a firm believer that everything had a use; even a land as dead as Nimbus might prove to be valuable at some stage, even if only to keep as a claim that the Predacons had the sector. Thus Nimbus needed constant patrolling; it was an area that Inferno could usually be found at if he had any off-duty time, though he would usually return with sand and tiny rocks smashed into his gears from a gully wall collapsing on him suddenly. Inferno, of course, would never complain, but would see some reason to inform Megatron of every collapse.

Still, Nimbus was not as bad as, say, Namtar, Scorponok privately thought as his six legs climbed around and over the rubble. Namtar was closer to the Maximal-Predacon border, and it was almost always teeming with one of the stronger Maximals; even if they were not present, the idiot rat would often leave proximity mines or other gifts for anyone curious or ambitious enough to overtake Namtar by a few steps. Sector Tengo was also riddled with such bombs, and Scorponok knew well enough that Axies was a favorite sector of the traitor Dinobot. All of those sectors, however, had valuable traits, which was largely why he was in Nimbus.

He stalked over a small pile of rubble, spraying the rocks aside, and pausing enough to shake a few of them out from his leg joints. _Stupid rubble. Stupid planet. Stupid...not Megatron, never at all, because Megatron still had his plans. Stupid Scorponok then. _

At least he assumed Megatron's plan had not wavered much; his leader had not seen fit to discuss such matters with him for some time now. Scorponok doubted that he shared such information with _anyone_, but the fact that he had once with his second in command and no longer did hurt, in a small way that Megatron would never understand. Then again, he also suspected that any plans he was informed of he would just misunderstand, or forget, or worse, be tricked into talking to one of the fool spiders about it. Megatron had his reasons, after all.

_If only he wasn't so damned impressed with Inferno still._

He did not see the stasis pod until he was nearly on it; even then, the planetary-orbitting pod was half jutting out from under a rock ridge, its rock-pocked lid not covered enough with dust for his feet not to slip when he contacted it, and he caught a glimpse of the dusty lid, the pod more coated with dirt, before his body once again betrayed him (or was it, he suspected as well, his _mind_ that betrayed him and his form?) and he slipped, slid, and crashed onto his stomach roughly some twenty feet below.

He groaned softly to himself as the final shudder of pain rippled through him, then looked up; perhaps he had _imagined_ seeing a pod there. It would not be the first time he had thought he saw something when nothing was truly there, or the inverse as well. But no, this time, the pod gleamed back at him dully, its metal shine marred with organic earth. A little over half of it was jammed into the gully wall; how it had landed in such a way Scorponok could only guess, but that didn't matter. Getting to the protoform did.

As he began climbing up the wall (his beast mode for once being useful), he realized a few rather dire thoughts almost instantly. The first on his mind was that Megatron would be thrilled with this news; Scorponok had never brought back a new protoform, and neither had Inferno; only the spiders had, and even as treacherous as they were, bringing home Inferno had seen them with small rewards. The second was that he might be able to pull the rest of the pod from its prison, or at least slam the ground around it enough for the damn thing to be retrieved. The third, and most pressing, becoming the first suddenly, was that he had a new Maximal stasis pod in the middle of Sector Nimbus, several miles from Darkside, with only Waspinator and Inferno left on monitor duty, and then pressing ahead from that thought, the knowledge that he had never reprogrammed a protoform before.

He froze at these revelations, eyes locked on the dully-gleaming pod. What to do. What to _do_. Logically, he should call for Tarantulas or Blackarachnia; whoever was closer could come and oversee this. No doubt Tarantulas kept a handy kit of Predacon behavior modification chips in his subspace; the widow might have started as well. Or he could call for Megatron, and then Megatron could summon whoever he wished for this delicate operation. Or he could even radio Darkside and have Inferno escort Tarantulas out here to modify the protoform. Or.

Or. It was madness and he knew it; despite his stupidity he knew it, but the thought was pressing. He could. He could _try_, and if he failed and the protoform died, no one else would be the wiser. If he failed and it rose as a Maximal, he could kill it easily out here, or simply cut the pod's power supply while it was being formed. But he could _try_. After Blackarachnia's pod had come down, Megatron had passed both Tarantulas and Scorponok a few modification chips "just in case." Tarantulas no doubt had made more, and likely he and Megatron did not remember that Scorponok possessed three still, but Scorponok was well aware of it.

He could try. And if he failed, as he had been failing lately, ever since the crash of Darkside, no one would need to know save himself, and the next time, if there _was_ a next time, he would simply call for Tarantulas to take over. But this time, in the middle of a ruined desert with a mostly whole stasis pod, that was not sending out warning alarms, he could try. The risk was worth it, even if Megatron would look at him with such approval only in his mind.

But first...to retrieve the pod. With any luck, the protoform might even be able to drag the metal carcass back to Darkside; the pod would be cannibalized into a number of projects, most of them usually ending up as supplies for Tarantulas. A protoform and a pod, bringing both back to base...not even the spider had managed to do that in ages; Inferno's pod had been destroyed long before its parts could be used. But how tempting the fantasy with his hope!

"Come on," he urged softly, resting slightly on the pod, four of his legs firmly planted on the hard dirt wall. "Come on you slagging piece of pod...out!" He slammed his claws down once, twice, three more times near the pod; the dirt shook, but the wall of the gully was thick and well packed. Simply striking it would not work, and digging it out would take far too long; the pod would activate long before then.

He eyed his claws for a moment; he did always keep a pair of explosive cyber-bees on hand, and even one would be plenty to knock the pod out of its prison. Out, he thought, and more than likely into a dozen pieces. Cheap Maximal equipment. No, no, that would never do. Perhaps pushing it from atop the pod? It _was_ at an angle; gravity might well help, and for once his bulk might as well. Careful of the dusty and slippery lid, he latched his feet on the best he could, stretching his tail flat across the back of the pod itself, and as careful as he could with balance and force, struck the dirt lip above the pod. _Smash. Smash. Sma-_

He had just enough time, as he usually did, he realized, to notice that the second strike had been enough; combined with his weight and gravity, perhaps even _one_ hit had been plenty from his vantage point. The second strike was possibly not that amiss though. The third, however...

The short surprised yell echoed over the otherwise dead land, mirroring with the crash of several pounds of hard clods of dirt and rock, but was overcome by the sudden crashing of the pod to the floor of the gully below; by some miracle the pod landed upright, and its support feet popped out, balancing the pod carefully over the rubble and partially over the secondly-stunned Scorponok.

He groaned lowly again, his head aching from the second impact, and managed to peek out of his stupor at the new sound. A low chirping, almost organic, but followed by words. _Pod activating. Suitable environment found for pod. Activation in progress._

"Slaaaag." Time was not on his side; he scurried out from under the support structures and transformed, eyeing over the panel which had opened, revealing several images of the activation in progress. If Tarantulas' cool demeanor when he had reprogrammed Blackarachnia was anything to go by, Scorponok, with his talents, had perhaps a half a minute before he would have to offline the pod intentionally. Knowing this, of course, was of no help.

The chip, though...where to put the slagging chip? He pulled it from subspace, eyed it warily, a tiny piece of metal on his far too large claw, and carefully used the other to touch the panel screen. Instantly the images changed, and he risked a very small and rare smile. A menu screen greeted him now, brilliant yellow text on a blue setting.

_Let's see. Stop Activation? No, not yet... Continue? Not yet either. And then there's the option for Reset and Deactivate, which is surely not what I want either. Other? Other might cover it. _

The menu changed, altered first to Maximal text, and then to the more common Neutral. Even better. Another menu though; another chance to ruin this one hope and chance of his for even a minor victory.

_There!_

He carefully tapped on the screen again, setting the control panel to engage and open. _Almost there! Tarantulas makes this look so hard...then again, with Blackarachnia he had a beast mode in mind, plus some...modifications otherwise._ The panel clicked open slowly, and there it was, the brilliant red chip with the Maximal insignia, too small for him to touch with his claws. He eyed it doubtfully, then the Predacon chip. _What to do_. No hands, but he did have a rather pointed clasp of a tail. It might work.

_Might_.

Arching his tail up and over his shoulder, he aimed, carefully, as careful as he could be, his claw tilted enough to drop the Predacon chip as soon as the Maximal one was displaced. And one, two...

"Activation at peak, scanning for life forms!" bellowed the twice-as-loud vocal of the pod, and, startled, he yelped, dropping the Predacon chip into the panel moments before it closed. Scorponok, however, did not see this, nor did he see the Maximal chip in its place still; the scanners for the pod rose, coming out from the pod's side and ramming into his knees as they did so; the Predacon landed heavily against the pod, and was thrown back from the momentum to his back and the ground, his tail stinger missing his back by a few inches, instead plowing into the air aimlessly. _Slag. Slag slag slag! Reprogramming a pod and I knock out the volume control. Nice move, idiot._

He rolled to his side and to his feet, eyeing the pod warily; the control panel had closed, and the scanners had apparently found something buried in the rock, for the pod had grown silent, the scanners gone, and he watched with silent hope. Perhaps another dinosaur would be scanned, or something large, as Inferno was, but without Inferno's lack of intellect. Scorponok had a base feeling that even if he returned to Darkside with another Waspinator, Megatron might be pleased; Waspinator could follow simple orders, of course, and he had a knack for being a living puzzle in a hundred pieces, never quite dead. He was useful, to an extent. But he could also dare to hope that the protoform, a Predacon now, of that he was sure (the chip was gone and the panel closed; where else could it have gone?), might also be a decent fighter, a warrior to replace the traitor Dinobot, but someone of his skill and size and power, but with Scorponok's loyalty. He could _hope_. So far hope, and, he had to admit, a great deal of luck, had found him a protoform, now a Predacon protoform. Was it too much to hope for a decent fighter now?

The pod slowly whirred, its lid lifting a few inches, then settling as light from within stretched out: a brilliant white-blue that Scorponok would forever associate with that feeling of intense hope, of luck, the realization that while he was damaged, not all was lost; he was still Second In Command, and now the others might well treat him as such.

The lid lifted for a final time, resting a good foot from the base of the pod, on small supports, and he carefully approached the device. What to say now, what to do? How would Megatron want his new troop greeted? What to say. Welcome to the Predacons seemed a bit too...foolish. Perhaps an introduction of himself; if he kept the words short and small, he might not stammer; the protoform would have no reason to think he was damaged, not yet.

And froze as a flash of yellow came from that crack between the lid and pod, remaining still as the pod finally opened fully, and a few moments later, a pair of tiny black feet, insect feet, crept out and onto the side of the pod. He stared, still daring to hope, when the new protoform, the new Predacon, his return to Megatron's good graces and trust, pulled himself out and stood, somewhat unsteadily, on six black feet, wings outstretched, wet still from whatever organic process its donor had undergone before being buried in stone.

He stood, and gaped, unable to even hiss a _slag_ at this creature. Bejeweled eyes, compound eyes as multifaceted as Waspinator's regarded him, brilliant blue-green, and the antennae, the curled mouth tube, and his optics travelled up and over the rest of the creature.

_Slag. Slag me. Slag this ALL._

_Even Waspinator was better than this!_

The new insect looked him over still, as if doubting him already, as if he _knew_ everything about Scorponok's idiocies already, and it finally spoke, its damp wings stretching still, shades of pink mingling with purple and goldenrod yellow flashing in the dusk of the desert. "Who are you?" it asked, but every twist of those words reeked of lyrical speech, of an audiophile who sang rather than spoke, and Scorponok looked over the butterfly with a dull dread, realizing that his luck had, ever since the Darkside crashed, always been of the bad kind.

"Who are you?" it repeated, stretching its wings, its wing filaments draping down inside the pod still, and Scorponok could only stare mutely. _Wonderful. Beautiful. Slagging perfect._

But that small part of his mind, the piece he felt now seemed like an insane shard in his patchwork mind, insisted that this was mere beastmode; after all, the alternative mode meant so little that many bots on Cybertron changed theirs with the passing of trends. A weak beastmode meant nothing, and should mean nothing as well. And a flyer, even a small one, might well prove to be another Waspinator, but that was better than nothing, than a protoform he would have to slag for being a Maximal.

Hope, so alien and strange, rose in him. "I'm Scorponok, second-in-command at Darkside and to Megatron." And those bejewled eyes stared at him so deeply, so oddly that his self-consciousness rose, battled with his hope, and emerged victorious, and he stepped back from the pod, beastmoding, a bulky, dirt-smeared hulk next to the new Predacon. "Identify yourself."

"My name is Imago," stated the protoform, its voice cooler, but still lyrical, soft and sweet and light, and stepped down from the pod, bronzed wing filaments draping down as it glided down, settling into the dust. "Is there a reason we have these forms?"

"Energon...energon overload," Scorponok mumbled. "Can't stay in bot mode for long." He turned what he hoped was a critical, and not confused, optic on the butterfly. "Are you a flyer?"

"I believe that is in my design." And silently (did it have a silent activation code? Primus knew that most of the Predacons and Maximals seemed to enjoy spouting their vocally) the small butterfly shifted into robot form, and for once Scorponok was pleased that his own beastmode allowed for no facial changes. Somehow, somewhere, he was certain that the pod had simply been defunct, the spark gone, or the activation process might have erased all sentience in the protoform...and somewhere, there was the new bot ahead of him, nearly Terrorsaur's height, but slender, lithe, with as much muscle and strength as the spider had loyalty, and a brilliant, glowing, impossible to ever camoflague yellow, as blazing as the cheetah Maximal, with oddly purple and pink markings. His wing filaments appeared to be weapons, not quite blades in his small hands, and the rest of his wings had arched up against his back, perhaps to act as shields, though they moved quite freely with the passing breeze. A warrior Imago was not; if his slight stance was anything to go by, his glance at his long staffs from his wing filaments, the fact he was barely taller than the Maximal rat, he was not much of anything, even as a target. The Maximals would die laughing before shooting him.

_Worse than Waspinator._ He stared for a moment, and Imago shifted back to his beastmode, stretching his dry wings, and then he was airborne, fluttering, the cosmos' idea of a cruel joke. "Should we return to the base then?"

"Yeah. Don't need the Maximals to find us." As if they would find them, of course, in the middle of Nimbus, with a forgotten stasis pod. _Why couldn't you have found this one, Maximals? Why?_

"Maximals?" That lyrical, musical voice, the final insult to injury, and the scorpion quite missed the darker tone in the word. At least it was the anthithesis of Terrorsaur's screamings, but Scorponok knew that that meant so little, and would mean so little to everyone at Darkside. He inspected the pod, whole, undamaged save for the dents from his blows, the lid uncracked. At the very least he had the pod. To bring it back without aid would be something else, if he could _keep_ it.

"Yes, Maximals. We're at war with them. Golden Disks, Megatron stole them. It.. Stole a ship, and we..." And he trailed off, forcing himself silent. Primus, it had started again; even with the new Predacon, the one who knew him only for a few seconds, and he had begun to stammer and string his words as painfully as Rhinox's chaingun attacks: words spouting and hitting everywhere without true aim. He refused to look around at the perplexity he knew would be on the butterfly's face, confusion that would soon spread to rolling optics and quiet (and not so quiet) laughs and smirks and perhaps the damn thing would be adding paint stripper into his armor polish with the other flyers as well.

"I see," replied the butterfly quietly, and perhaps it was because of the stammering speech that his voice, still dancing and singing, seemed colder, as if he had already discovered and knew what the other Predacons had of their second-in-command. "Then to base, Scorponok. Do we truly need the pod? It's hardly spaceworthy now."

"Spare parts," was the barely audible reply, and Imago watched as the scorpion scuttled around the stasis pod, tapping against it with his cumbersome claws, pushing it slightly across the rubble. The scorpion had disappeared entirely around the side of the pod before his voice could be heard again, stammering slightly as he spoke into his ComLink, oblivious to the butterfly perched lightly over the dome of the pod, antennae flat as he listened. "Scorponok to Inferno. There's a pod in Nimbus. Co-co-ordinates 15...no, 14, 37, 10. Bring it back to base." There was a loud voice in reply, an abrasive yell, something about royalty, but Scorponok cut the link quickly, and stepped back around to the butterfly, who was preening his wings from atop the pod.

"Uh...Inferno will bring this back to base. Let's go."

"Of course." The butterfly, so disgustingly delicate, rose, flapping his long wings carefully as he rode the breeze up, and for a moment he seemed mocking in flight, not the first and not the final laugh at his groundbound guide, though for now, there was no mocking Scorponok could find in his singing voice. _Does he even know how he sounds, I wonder._ "Let the way, Scorponok...I will follow."

The scorpion cast one more baleful look at the pod, the pod that Inferno would need to bring in now; there was no way Imago's bonds would be tight enough to secure the pod to him, and he knew darkly now that he had lost his chance as well, his only chance to remove the butterfly, his hope for a status return in Megatron's optics, that the flying insect was, even as weak as he was, out of his range and grasp to destroy. All that was left now was to return to base, to hear the laughter again, to go back as he had left the Darkside, an idiot, a stupid fool with a weak flying spider-snack, who would, despite his weakness and fraility, end up with the other idiot flyers. And he wordlessly began the trek back to Darkside, the shadow of the newest Predacon overlapping his unsteady gait, the slow beating of the wings above him deafening in his defeat.

The same luck that had led Scorponok to the pod remained with him, and his fluttering follower, nearly all the way to the promenade room of Darkside. He had received a com from Inferno nearly halfway to the ship, the ant, as usual, sputtering about the Royalty being pleased with such a device, and with Inferno's turn of speed and fanatic need to show the Royalty his loyalty at every turn, the ant would likely be at base by the time they returned. Inferno, however, was nowhere in sight as they approached the beaten and broken ship, Imago saying nothing of the derelict, or the hot winds that seemed to blow him dangerously close to the lava pools. The butterfly had earned, despite Scorponok's misgivings, a few personal points for not landing on his back and expecting to be carried to the ship, something Waspinator and Terrorsaur had done multiple times, even taking care to steer the scorpion precariously to the pits themselves.

There was even, amazingly enough, no one arriving or leaving for patrol, and they were able to enter the ship easily and silently. Of course, there would still be Megatron and his disappointment (and likely rage) to face, but Scorponok could handle that far better without the jeers of his comrades in witness.

His luck, however, ended at the promenade entrance with a low screech of amazement, and the scorpion looked up quickly, not surprised particularly to see Terrorsaur lounging in the hall. For a moment, the red flyer seemed too stunned for another word as his red optics took in the delicate brilliant yellow butterfly, who had landed and was carefully following the scorpion, and then what little self-control he had broke, burst, and his laughter was high and screechy, all the worse from the source.

"Scorpi, _what_ did you bring back? I heard Inferno went out to bring back a pod. I didn't know _you_ were bringing back a snack for Tarantulas! He looks like he might make half a bite. Scrawny little thing, isn't he? Aren't you? Can't speak either, flower-sniffer?"

Scorponok found himself mildly amazed that Imago was not, in fact, taking the bait, and instead the brilliant blue eyes, multifaceted, took in the multitude of mocking Terrorsaur, the flyer nearly slumped against the wall, laughing still, as if he could simply not keep his joy inside, in silence. He would, of course, learn soon enough that merely bearing the laughs and the mocking wasn't enough, but he, unlike Scorponok, didn't seem to be stupid. He might well, Scorponok knew, be laughed and jeered at for a while, perhaps always for his size and strength, or lack of it, but he could always add armor. He could always pair up with the blast-prone wasp to deflect damage. He, unlike Scorponok, still had a chance, singsong voice or no.

"I'm taking him to Me-Meg-Megatron," the scorpion managed, transforming as he and the butterfly bypassed Terrorsaur, and noted, with some dread but little surprise, the wasp on monitor duty, sitting next to a disgruntled Blackarachnia, and the red flyer, of course, sliding in behind them, choking back softer chuckles. And before them, watching as always, sat Megatron on his throne, one optic discretely on the she-spider and the wasp, the other tracking something on his monitors, though both of his blazing optics were on Scorponok, carefully holding onto his hoverboard, and then dropped to the bright yellow shape slightly behind him.

"Is this our new Predacon?" came the incredulous voice of his commander, and Scorponok was silent, only able to nod, trembling slightly as the wasp and she-spider turned to see this newcomer, their optics resting on the butterfly who rose, small clawed feet gripping the side bars of the hoverboard, as if displaying himself, as if their loud laughter was normal.

"You can't be serious..." "Izz snack for zzpider-bot!" "Way to go, shellhead, way better than Inferno!"

"Scorponok..." And yet it was Megatron who seemed to be keeping his rage at this worthless bot in check, and his furious glare silenced the others, though the scorpion could well hear their softer laughs, the whispered jokes. "Beastmode aside, Scorponok, this is a good addition to the ranks." His optics, however, mentioned silently that even a good addition had a role to play; Waspinator might well be bumped up from cannon fodder to senior cannon fodder. And if nothing else, Scorponok, the Maximals may well laugh enough to be distracted for the fatal shot elsewhere... "Insect, transform."

"Of course, leader," replied the butterfly softly, and even Megatron could not disguise his disbelieving look at the lyrical voice, the other Predacons' laughing nearly drowning him out; and he transformed silently, almost defiantly glancing once at his comrades before returning a calm gaze to Megatron, as if a tiny, ridiculously yellow bot, holding his filaments (swords? No, they had no blades. Whips perhaps? Flails?) in one small delicate hand (and for the first time Scorponok noticed that his nails, not talons, very small slightly curved, as his beastmode feet were, nails were a brilliant purple and pink) was accepting a challenge. Was, in fact, not as weak as he appeared, as small and as laughably worthless.

For several long, silent moments, Scorponok stood next to his discovery, watching Megatron's face go from calm with irritated optics, to something quite, for a moment, almost pitying, almost for a split moment, and then he raised his beastmode-head, clicking it open slightly that the speechless Scorponok could see the lit laser within, ready to fire. _Megatron! You can't mean...this was a mistake, it was only a mistake, I had no control over the pod's selection or who was in it...you can't mean to destroy me for it!_

_You know I'm stupid, Megatron. You know I didn't mean this!_

"Scorponok," said his leader calmly, almost patiently, but he could sense and hear the rage underlining the smooth voice, "you are due for a commendation for bringing a new fighter back to base, but you have missed a very very vital piece of stasis pods."

The scorpion-bot simply stared in disbelief, barely aware of his claws clicking frantically, of Imago's presence beside him, the yellow barely visible from the corner of his optic, the newest recruit stunned and ready perhaps to flee, as if his flight system would save him at such short range.

"So I will tell you. We had no pods aboard Darkside, Scorponok, and so we steal the ones that land from the Maximals, and we reprogram the protoforms into Predacons. All very important steps. You missed one."

"You have brought a Maximal right inside our base, Scorponok."

He was frozen for barely a second before he turned a horrified gaze to stare at Imago, the butterfly glancing back at him blankly, but there upon his helmet, right where the idiot cheetah showed his own allegiance mark, was the bloody red Maximal sigil, glowing almost against the yellow armor, gleaming as if mocking him for the final laugh.

He did not know what he was trying to say: perhaps his leader's name, a protest, a plea, a beg for his life to be spared, or perhaps a plea to be destroyed, to lose this final idiocy of his life, but the words died in his vocal processor as he turned back to Megatron in time to see the laser fire upon him.


End file.
